This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Given a Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) of a family of proteins we want to find evolutionarily conserved and covarying residues, which we believe would be functionally and structurally important. Specifically we propose to elicit the structure of a Markov Random Field from the MSA, and study this structure in terms of it's ability to discriminate sequences of this family from others and also to generate new sequences which are functionally and structurally identical to ones in the family.